Apple’s UK App Store prices will rise 25% following Brexit currency fluctuations
theverge.com
theverge.com
Restoring that employment is a separate track than reducing globalization - that is to say: you can de-globalize and exit whatever trade treaties you like, but those jobs you lost to globalization will not magically come back.
Citizens have been sold a bill of goods in both directions when experts and politicians under-report the side effects and exaggerate the benefits.
I don't know the answer to that question; I think most economists would tell you that you cannot and you should not try.
Many people talk about "job creation", but a lot of what we hear about job creation is political mumbo jumbo tax reduction bullshit.
Here are a few things that may help job creation from a political or government point of view:
1. Municipalities, State, and the Federal government should rationalize their requirements for starting and running a business. The US is already much better about this than other countries, but reducing bureaucratic friction is always good. This doesn't mean less government, it means smarter government.
2. One quick hit job creator is government infrastructure spending. The US did this after 2008, and so far it's turned out pretty well!
3. In the future there may be fewer jobs. Society needs to start seriously considering localized post-scarcity economies.
So what mechanisms keep the price from instantly dropping if "everyone" agrees it should be lower? Market inefficiencies? Or lots of money betting on an upswing?
Someone should probably tell the worlds biggest futures exchange that their forward rate for GBPUSD is wrong then:
http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/fx/g10/british-pound.html
Methinks someone is talking nonsense
> o what mechanisms keep the price from instantly dropping if "everyone" agrees it should be lower?
It would drop. It hasn't, because that is not what the "experts" consensus is
Earlier today it was "strong buy".
The "financial analysts" are talking nonsense basically. If they're so sure it's going to drop further they should short the pound now, as much as they can. That in itself would cause the pound to drop, and then whatever effect they're predicting would be priced in.
I'm writing a bot that shorts on Donald Trumps tweeting company names...
That forecast was completely wrong, the opposite has happened.
As it's widely been reported in the UK, in both lefty and righty papers, I'm surprised you've failed to see it. It's been mentioned every time we get a positive growth figure, or an unemployment fall, or whatever.
The tragedy is that the British economy was going well through the beginning of 2016 and after a bumpy road immediately after the vote that momentum has held up over the last 6 months. That won't help us if we really do crash out of the EU hard.
No. It might be. I'll even accept will probably be. You haven't got a clue, I haven't got a clue. Professors of economics at respected universities don't agree, in house analysts at top financial institutions don't agree. At best you can say that heavily politically influenced bodies tend to agree.
I'm fine with you stating an opinion on this stuff, I have my own expectations (chunky period of inflation and stagnant growth at best) - but I'm awfully tired of people selling forecasts as facts
Then they were naive analyses rather than expert analyses weren't they?
Did anyone seriously think Cameron would stay on to implement Brexit? Only someone utterly clueless about British politics could have thought that - it was obvious there'd be a leadership change in the event of a leave vote.
It is also obvious that Article 50 was deliberately botched, the guy who wrote it have said so explicitly. 2 years is a stupid choice for the amount of time available, designed specifically to discourage people from trying to leave. So assuming it'd be invoked immediately anyway was a very bad assumption.
No matter how you slice it, the so-called "experts" were completely wrong and excuses don't cut it.
It's 5% more than the pound's loss in value next to the Dollar. But bear in mind that for the last 6 months Apple has simply swallowed a 20% reduction in their (and developers) UK App Store revenue. Look at it that way and we in the UK have enjoyed subsidized prices for most of the last year.
People here are reading way more into that 5% than is remotely warranted and for ludicrously incidental reasons. What's actually happening here is very simple. Apple has been taking a hit for a while. They are re-aligning prices to the nearest logical breakpoint. That's it. All that analyst guff about Brexit downside risks because of a slight percentage discrepancy with exchange rates is just because analysts don't know crap about the real reason - marketing.
Otherwise I agree with you.
Apple uses prices aligned to multiples of these units, with some rounding. So when Apple realigns UK prices to take into account currency fluctuations, they do so based on a combination of how much and how long the exchange rate has changed, and what their target price units and price points are. Also I'm sure they factor in holiday season timing to e.g. avoid negative publicity running up to Christmas.
Eg: Tier 87 is automatically $1399 CAD, as long as you allow that app to be available in the Canada App Store.
Now, with that being said, I have not seen an instance of a developer or seller abusing the localization API for this purpose... meaning forcibly charging other stores for the same in-app purchase content. A separate in-app purchase would have to be made in any case for other stores to route to. Apple has a pretty firm fist and I imagine location abuse like this may lead to the seller's account being banned or punished. It may be perfectly allowed however, I haven't dug too deep into the TOS.
Asymmetric uncertainty: some people believe there is a small chance that things could change for the better; in that case, the market will go up spectacularly and Apple will update their prices again. If that doesn’t happen, Apple doesn’t have to change their price again, which is, I presume, a fairly costly operation — but the equilibrium rate with an effective Brexit is lower than where it is now.
Once such situation is if the Parliament refuses to approve the referendum: Courts have rules their vote is needed, and most MPs were against Brexit beforehand.
OK, '25 percent due to Brexit' is going to get more clicks.
Apple sometimes eats the currency difference but if they think the currency value will trend down they generally don't.
I'm glad time have changed and there is less fanboism from Apple evangelists online. Their arguments were just obnoxious.
I know that dollars = pounds/euros is usually how it works, but the disparity is never quite as large when you consider both the currency valuations and the fact that the price never includes tax.
Are you arguing that the massive drop in the pound isn't due to Brexit? As far as I'm aware even the most rabid Farage-fanciers don't argue that, but argue it's a good thing (Cheaper exports! As though we don't import most of the raw materials, but that's not as snappy).
Where you get me arguing about the massive drop in the pound I don't know?
Because, Apple has changed it's prices because of the drop in the pound?
The pound dropped because of Brexit.
You said that Brexit wasn't the cause of the price change.
So when one of the first comments on a report of an actual, verifiable consequence is implying that "This has nothing to do with Brexit and is just lying about it to get clicks", then I think that shouldn't be allowed to just stand on it's own?
In this case, 25% doesn't matter. It's literally not a big deal. It's 50 pence.
There's another point to be made here that goes along the same lines as this horse-crap. It's this: shit it going to get weird when brexit happens.
Well, we don't know that yet. It's probably true, but we don't know for a fact yet.
But people post shit like this with bullshit click-bait titles, and then who knows what happens next? Why don't you just stop?
Why don't you fuck off until you know something for real is going to happen?
Percentages are not good measures of small quantities. 25 percent of zero is still zero.
It's not a meaningful number.
If you're dealing with small amounts, use small amounts. This is junk.
This is a great use case for a thing called averages.
The correct title for the article would be this:
"Apps to increase in price by almost nothing following . . ."
Here's the last 10 years: http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=GBP&to=USD&view=10Y
(not that currency exchange rate is by any means a health indicator)
There was a stable level at 1.95 in 2007-2008, then a drop and a sinusoid around 1.55 for 8 years, then another drop to lower levels after Brexit. We'll see where it goes from there.
By contrast UK debt-to-GDP: 90% and falling, and a US-UK trade deal is likely very soon.
I'd rather own Sterling.
Markets are not and never have been perfectly efficient. This is why traders are able to make money - they use information at their disposal that indicates the market value is incorrect to trade against that value. By definition if the market value was always correct that wouldn't be possible. So there is a feedback mechanism from information to market values, but there are many reasons those mechanisms might not work. There might be other more attractive targets for money that would otherwise be used to take advantage of that information. There might be a lack of liquidity preventing funds being deployed at all. There might be short term risks deterring long term bets on accepted trends.
Imagine if half the currency traders in the world stopped trading. All of a sudden all of those inputs into currency prices would no longer exist. Would currency prices continue being traded in exactly the same way and weeks or months later be at exactly the same value they would have been before? No, because losing all those inputs into the market would reduce the information flow that drives market value. To look at the opposite case, does the world have the ultimate possible expression of the ideal set of perfect currency traders using perfect information? Probably not, so the market value probably isn't what it would be if there were, i.e. the current market prices probably isn't at it's perfect ideal value.
I think what I was trying to put across is there probably isn't much news that could come out of brexit that would push them much lower, the worst outcome for the markets is heading towards WTO rules and that looks like what we are going to get.
The earliest that this can happen is 2019, when the UK ceases to be a member of the EU. And since EU rules prohibit members from negotiating their own trade agreements, its probably going to be 2020 or later before a deal is signed.
If you just walk away, you leave a mountain of chaos that would have to be handled in courts.
As for the UK joining NAFTA: politically impossible.
Maybe not Nafta, but TTIP could probably be signed the day the UK leaves. Whether that's a good thing for the UK... eh.
It would be very ironic, in the Morrissette sense: the spectre of TTIP ratification was used by Brexit supporter in the referendum campaign as a reason to leave the EU, and now we could end up being the only country that actually signs it.
So the UK can't 'withdraw unilateral whenever it wants' without creating a giant legal problem as its erstwhile partners attempt to enforce its (still extant) obligations.
https://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=ds22a34krhq5p...
Which has UK increasing, and Germany and the EU decreasing.
> and a US-UK trade deal is likely very soon.
Again, source for this, other than magical wishful-thinking? Considering
a) It's still illegal for the UK to make trade deals until it's out of the EU b) "Fast" is entirely based on a statement from Trump. Trump's statements are entirely meaningless because he always says exactly what the person wants to hear, regardless of complexities or whether it's actually achievable (allowing the press to trumpet the statements as fact). Trade deals are never fast because it's never a zero-sum game.
there's very little the EU can do to stop it
Of course there may not be much room for negotiation given the UK has been successfully burning bridges with the other EU members.
I think they call it "out of the frying pan into the fire".
So where is the UK trade deal?
Sure, right after Mexico sends a check for the wall.
Debt to GDP does not look falling to me: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...
Bear in Mind Apple have been eating the post-Brexit drop in their UK revenues with no price rises for the last 6 months.
So if the parent believes that Apple is overcharging but consumers just aren't seeing it properly, maybe if they overcharge even more, consumers will finally realize they've been bamboozled the whole time.